Scenario will "experiment with more open-world gameplay".

Bohemia Interactive has unveiled its plans for realistic military FPS Arma 3 over the rest of 2018, which include a new singleplayer scenario. The scenario, which will be out towards the end of the year, will be free for owners of the game's Apex expansion, and will "experiment with more open-world gameplay".

It's codenamed "Old Man" and it "serves as an epilogue to the story in Arma 3's 'The East Wind' and 'Apex Protocol' campaigns," Bohemia said. The developer's designers are still in the initial planning stage but "will start production very soon".

A portion of the development team has moved onto other projects, which means you can only expect one other major update this year. It's called Encore, and it will add new free ships, weapons and radar systems, as well as improved scenarios and campaign missions. It's due this summer.

Bohemia also said it plans to add its first batch of third-party paid-for DLC in 2019. It sent out an open invitation to other developers and the Arma 3 community last year, looking for ideas for expansions that could be made externally and then sold as premium DLC on Steam. Since then, it has received "several promising pitches", it said.

"Even though the development itself would be in the hands of outside developers, there are still a lot of organizational challenges for us to solve," it said. "As such, there's still a small possibility that this initiative will never come to fruition. But we're optimistic, and assuming we'll succeed, we wish to see a first round of third-party DLC published in 2019 or even sooner."